She grew up in a New Mexico town about 40 miles east of Albuquerque with fewer than 2,000 residents. Most college-bound kids headed to state universities. After she took the PSAT, the incoming college mail piqued her interest in liberal arts colleges, where she thought she would get both pushed and nurtured. If she was going to travel across the country, Davidson seemed like a place that would make her comfortable with uncertainty and with tackling big problems. A Terry scholarship closed the deal.
She arrived keenly interested in water, an important part of her culture in New Mexico. She majored in political sciencenot a STEM discipline, and geared her Davidson studies, writings and internships toward developing the skills to design better water policy. After graduation, she wanted to ramp up her science and data bona fides to better work with laws and regulation. Then, she got hooked on science. She earned a master’s degree in water science and management at New Mexico State University, looking at water shared across national borders, but also discovered how well data could help build an understanding of policy and human systems.
Atkins’s boss at the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute encouraged what Atkins had cultivated at Davidson — learning to learn, taking on new responsibilities. She ventured into large computational models as a data revolution was under way. She worked on finding ways that analysis could help water decision-making and she grew fascinated with the data analysis and computing possibilities. She moved to UC Berkeley as executive director of the West Big Data Innovation Hub, still engaged in water research but with an eye toward the broader possibilities of research involving massive amounts of data and computing power.
Three years ago, she moved to UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center, an institution that helped form the worldwide web, the commercial internet and where she now is deputy director. The U.S. National Science Foundation just awarded the center a $35 million grant to establish and run the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Operations Center. The center will connect researchers, educators and students with advanced computing resources, high-quality data, AI models, tools and training to which they otherwise would not have either access or the ability to acquire on their own.
“We help fill that niche for people across the entire spectrum of users,” Atkins said, “from an educator hoping to incorporate AI in their class to researchers focused on cancer breakthroughs.”
These are the solutions to those big problems Atkins aimed for at Davidson. She said the new center offers the potential for more people than ever to benefit from — and be part of — scientific discovery.
“I credit so much of my path, and even how I think about the world and how I approach work, to Davidson,” Atkins said. “When it comes to navigating a job market, there are constantly shifting technologies. If you focus on just learning those, they could be obsolete soon. What has served me best is [at Davidson] you get very comfortable thinking about things differently, pushing yourself. All of the critical thinking skills that Davidson equipped me with, I just lean on those again and again and again. Davidson sets you up well to be a lifelong learner. That’s what’s most important, whether it’s a new technology or a new field.”
Source: www.davidson.edu
